by Ouida
The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was still.
On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.
In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten — the dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.
Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had turned.
But she walked on steadily.
At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that would look on her without a frown.
It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each other, and want no other cheer or comrade.
It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year’s-night she had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad, though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the hearth had been cold.
She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without derision or told her woes without condemnation.
His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the side of a stream.
A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on the rarefied sharp air.
She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night, and went to the door and pushed against it to open it — it was locked.
She struck it with her hand.
“Open, Marcellin — open quickly. It is only I.”
There was no answer.
She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.
A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, “Who is there?”
“It is I, Marcellin,” she answered. “It is not night. I am come to be an hour with you. Is anything amiss?”
The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her, peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire, and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.
“Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?” she asked.
“Marcellin, yes — where is he?”
“He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my place.”
“Died!”
Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.
“Yes, why not?” grumbled the old woman. “To be sure, men said that God would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years for him — you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger than the saints — somehow. You are that thing of Yprès, are you not? Get you gone!”
“Who are you? Why are you here?” she gasped.
Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.
“I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he dwelt,” the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. “I stood out a whole day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what can one do? —— and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take your foot from my door!”
Folle-Farine stood motionless.
“When did he die, and how?” she asked in her teeth.
“He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night from this,” answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet dreading the one to whom she spoke. “Perhaps he had been hungered, I do not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer — anyways he was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch him. They say they saw the mark of the devil’s claws on him. At last they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He died just under the great Calvary — it was like his blasphemy. They have put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God, and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul fiend for him — they are surely together now.”
And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.
“Not but what the devil can get through the chinks,” she muttered, as she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.
Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.
“He died alone — he died alone,” she muttered, a thousand times, as she crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one friend on earth.
The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness to all the maledictions of men.
The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer, — these which were so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.
For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a hundred years.
For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and many sighs of shuddering breezes.
The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half the heavens.
There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.
Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward, black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard; blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam; driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.
The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new life
was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its face.
A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and, striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing wall within.
It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
A man watched the spider as it went.
It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the glow of the sunken sun.
It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding, breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve and multiplied.
It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.
He had been unwise — always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.
He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and bitter to the rich.
But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his yielding to their torments.
He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what they gained, would have held him accursed — the madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the future who cares, — save the madmen themselves?
He watched the spider as it went.
It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a kingdom — if only in dreams.
This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth; and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and power and worth.
The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.
Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.
It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.
Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm, in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth, begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled tropic flower.
It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones — a moth that should have been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate, lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.
A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus-leaf.
A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread out their pale gold on the level of the floor.
It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed, wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.
It lived before its time, — and it was like the human soul, which, being born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in wretchedness.
It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.
There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.
The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and forgotten.
The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies, teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its hoard.
He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth. Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life which perishes of divine desire.
Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.
His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows of winter hid all offal from its fangs.
It was horrible.
He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all — the sheer animal need of food. “J’avais quelque chose là!” was, perhaps, the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with it.
When the man clings to life for life’s sake, because it is fair and sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is the agony of Prometheus.
With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force,
which compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety, of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon earth.
Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he knows — and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang — will be numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all that men behold of death.
It was so with this man now.
Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die; it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any toothless snake would perish in its swamp.
He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the title-deeds of his own heirship to the world’s kingdom of fame.
For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly as he looked:
“They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my body in a ditch,” he thought.
And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of the lamp behind him.
They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some housewife’s kitchen-stove.
What matter?